The libraries of historical institutions often amass collections of short papers or extracts from essay collections or larger publications, called "særtrykk" or "offprints." Not very long ago, all academics from young graduate students to seasoned professors used the thin, portable offprint as a networking device, circulating their short publications among their fellow scholars. Today, these offprints, now relegated to filing cabinets or dusty boxes in the back corners of various research libraries, often go ignored and unstudied, as they have been fully replaced by the universal and pervasive pdf file.
Despite their unassuming appearance, however, offprints are proving to be important tools for the study of institutions, as they make tangible the professional and personal networks that surround a given academic environment. The new exhibition includes a selection of fascinating offprints from DNIR's library, chosen primarily for their handwritten inscriptions, revealing the collegial relationships between DNIR's founding members and the rest of the scholarly world at that time, in Rome and beyond.
This digital exhibition is now accessible online in English:
Creating Scholarly Networks and Collections: The Offprint Collection of the Norwegian Institute of Rome
This is the first of three exhibitions for the HF-sponsored project Digitalizing the Archive: A Roman Chapter in HF's History, an endeavor to present the contents of DNIR's archival holdings in creative and accessible ways.
See also the recent Institute blog post about the work on the offprint collection.
By Virginia Grace Kendall.